


trial and error

by bibliocratic



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: A smidgen of hurt/comfort, Fluff, Jon is Trying™, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Mute Jon, Softness, post-160
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-23 14:50:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23279839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliocratic/pseuds/bibliocratic
Summary: Jon is trying to propose.This is easier said than done.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 38
Kudos: 423





	trial and error

Jon tries to write vows.

Hunched over, crow-spined and squinting in the feeble cast of the firelight, he scribbles, mutters, scratches out, furrows his brow and clenches his fingers and snarls under his breath in irritation, at his fumbling incapacity for words. He was not born with a poetic soul, and his admiration for Martin's humble offerings grows each passing minute. His words sputter out of him with all the ease of water from a broken tap.

Jon has taken first watch, and it's a duty he approaches solemnly. They've broken into a boarded-up hairdresser's, set up their sleeping bags and meagre provisions and even a small fire in a waste-paper bin for warmth in the cramped office-slash-storage space at the back. Every noise, creak and snap and distant shriek has Jon straightening, widening the circle of his Knowing like a fishing net, giving it an exhausted push outwards and dredging it back in a reflex that gets harder each time. The lawless world they are in has at least one advantage; nothing but the most fool-hardy of things wants to touch the architect of this nether-world of horrors, nothing skulking or spiralling or swooping wants to challenge an unfettered Avatar. It's more people, these days, that they have learned to avoid.

Martin twitches in his sleep. Sleeping bag pulled up over his face, hair sprouting out like a carrot-top, head pillowed by folded-over barber capes. His body is snug against but turned away from Jon, who is sitting up, his back supported by plastic-wrapped boxes of industrial-size shampoos and hair rollers. Jon frowns again, his lines only deepening as he listens to the soft, undisturbed in and out of Martin's breathing. Because he wants to get this one right. To place words like mosaic tiles to create the imagery of his intention, to capture everything he feels he needs to say.

Martin deserves this. Jon can give him so few words, these days. Jon wants to give him ones that will mean something.

His impatience is one of the few things that the last few years hasn't chewed out of him. He huffs, irritable and discontent, his frustration leaden under his skin, and scrunches up another paper to sacrifice to his petty mood.

When Martin takes the next watch, he finds a nest of fire-scourged paper balls dying in the embers.

* * *

Jon tries to find rings.

His intention is to be a few minutes. He unpeels himself around dawn from Martin's heavy, slightly sweaty arms, gently shushing the unhappy noise this draws from his mouth. The jeweller's is ten minutes from where they've holed up today, and Jon steals away guiltily, keeping his Eye on Martin long after he's left to make sure he doesn't wake up to find him gone.

Jon is away too long. He reaches the small, high-street shop with no issue, doesn't even need to pick the shattered lock of the door. Inside, he finds a scatter of rings and necklaces, but they're all soot-charred, twisted from an unnatural heat, their metals warped irreparable. And then there is something tooth-filled in the recesses of the jeweller's, something that smells the human stench of him and feels hungry, and it takes Jon an hour to give it the slip, leading it into a fog-bank half a mile away to be subsumed by the greedy pull of the mist.

He Looks out of himself, and against the borders of him, he feels a blanketing heat-shimmer of terror and knows it isn't his own.

His long legs take the streets at a run, huffing as he reaches the grey-stone public square at the centre of the city, exposed and empty of people. Getting nearer, he hears a looping, repetitive nightingale whistle, low and plaintive. It stops, waits, and starts up again.

Jon, with perfect mimicry, makes the high harsh caw of a crow in reply.

Martin is standing at the door of the Wagamama's they broke into, his feet unshod by shoes, his hair uncombed and flattened at one side. The creep of dawn is not so faint that Jon can't see the pale wash of his face, the tightness of his jaw, the relief that cascades across it like the release of a dammed-up waterfall when he sees Jon haring his way across the vacant space of the square to greet him.

“Where were you?” Martin demands even before he reaches him. His hands running over him as soon as Jon gets close enough, checking for hurt, injury, his voice high and pitchy and failing to translate his panic into something else. “God, I woke up, and – don't do that Jon! Anything could've – I had no idea where you'd – and what the _hell_ were you thinking?”

Jon's hands motion, miserably, desperate to soothe and knowing it can't be that easy, _sorry, sorry, sorry._

“Where did you go?” Martin repeats, insistent, almost angry but forcing it down to simmer at a hysteric-laced frustration. He doesn't usually push, usually recognises the limits of what Jon can communicate, allows them both space to sit down with paper and pencil and is patient with the slower exchange of this. But his shirt is coated with sweat around the throat and arms, his hands curling into fists to stop their juddering, nerve-shocked motions, and Jon tries to imagine how he would feel, should he wake up, and find Martin gone.

He pauses before opening his mouth.

“ _Looking for something,_ ” he says carefully with a stolen clear-cut pronunciation, bathed in an entitled, self-absorbed air. Rifles through his records, despairing to find no words that he can chop-and-change together like a collage of explanation, glances up at Martin's distressed expression.

“Did you find it?”

Jon shakes his head.

“ _I feel like an idiot,_ ” he tries again in a pleasant, justifying voice, and wishes someone had put to records some better expression of apology. Wishes someone had used the right words in the appropriate manner; stronger still, wishes his voice was his own again, a domain he could claim unsullied by the burden of his title. That he could say something, anything to wipe the blanket fear from Martin's scruffy face.

“Yeah, well,” Martin grumbles after a while, wiping at his eyes. “I knew that already.”

_Sorry,_ Jon signs again, but Martin is stilling his hands, gentle even now, and bundles him into a tight, bone-squeeze of a hug.

“Don't do that to me again, Jon, please,” he whispers shakily.

Jon doesn't try and find rings again.

* * *

  
Jon tries to plan a proposal.

He knows, deep down, that the best intentioned version of himself is a planner. Likes order and alphabetized files and organisational stationery, is happiest with a well-crafted spreadsheet or a completed to-do list. Jonathan Sims is a man easily satisfied by things as they should be, appeased and engaged by the challenge of a logical puzzle, a knotty problem he can sort by analysis and application.

He also knows that there is another version of himself. The one that rashly takes an axe to possessed tables and jumps into fog-bound seascapes and soil-stuffed coffins after the people he loves.

He does try. He thinks of picturesque spots he can take Martin, places where the scenery isn't so horror-fucked, where there are still banks from which they can watch sunsets. But the picturesque spots, when they aren't shadow-infested or crawling with overzealous fungal growths that warn of Corruption nearby, are chilly, and there's not exactly time to stop and admire the views much anyway.

The sunset-stained bank is a near success; drought-scoured and pocked with frost-damage, but the evening colours are unashamedly glorious. Jon spends hours trying to muster the courage and words and correct gestures, only for Martin, drained and wiped out from a run-in with the Flesh, to fall asleep on Jon's shoulder, his hair flopping over his face, a comforting dead-weight. Jon adjusts them carefully so Martin's head is cushioned against his thigh, and scratches his fingers soothingly through his hair as he watches the sunset alone.

But one day they're making their way through the Peak District, and they've found a tumbling river with a small waterfall. Martin's flicked water at him with a butter-wouldn't-melt smile, and Jon replied in kind, and Martin had made a shrieking giggling scandalised 'Jon!' as he continued splashing him. And it might have been the way the water dripped down his face and over his freckles, or the way the dim daylight caught his profile, or it might have been the bold and untempered heat that burnt like a forge in Jon's chest to hear the high, bright sound of his rare happiness, but whatever it was, the other version of Jon resurfaces. Decides that he doesn't need romantic scenery or rings or vows or other people's words in his mouth, that life is short and this can't wait and he wants this, wants Martin, more than anything.

First, he drags Martin to him. On his tiptoes, arms locked around shoulders, feeling Martin hum, surprised but pleased as he kisses him.

It is a good kiss. One of his best. Jon feels a little bit smug about it when they separate and Martin is slightly out of breath, a comet-streak of heat across his face, looking a bit struck at Jon's forwardness.

Jon seals his first kiss with a second, smaller, softer kiss, making sure Martin's looking at him.

Then he lowers himself onto one knee.

“Jon, what are you – ?” Martin asks, his face creasing with confusion. But Jon has chosen the most unsubtle non-verbal gesture he can, and refuses to look away from him, gazing up and waiting for the penny to drop, even as his knees complain on the hard rocky ground, even as his own doubts swarm that Martin won't understand, Martin won't want to, Martin might say no.

Martin gives a little sucked-in gasp.

“Jon, are you, are you asking...?”

Jon is nodding, almost feverish, and Martin's face has gone the colour of a vibrant sunrise, moisture welling up in his eyes. Jon reaches out, takes one of Martin's hands in his smaller hold, touches with the pad of his thumb the space where, if he could, he would have slotted a ring.

He lets go and precisely and delicately, he signs _I love you._ They don't have the vocabulary for grander expressions, but Jon doesn't have anything else he needs to say anyway.

“Jon, you – god, I love you,” Martin replies, damp-voiced and faint, a broad and beaming smile widening across and lighting up his face. There's not a pause before he's eagerly going to his knees to join Jon, pressing fierce, hopelessly charmed kisses against his lips, cradling his face in his hands, and Jon's so dazed by the onslaught, it takes him a minute to sign _Yes?_ at Martin.

“I – oh, yeah! Of course, yes, _yes_ ,” Martin replies, still struck by a thoughtless delighted giddiness.

Then: “Oh! Oh, oh, wait just a minute I – ”

He's digging his hands into his left trouser-pocket, tugging it out, pressing what he's found into Jon's hands.

Jon opens the travel-knocked, slightly cracked box to see two unpolished plain bands sat snugly in their display, and his own smile blossoms like a firework on his face.

**Author's Note:**

> Jon's dialogue is taken from Tova McHugh (155: Cost of Living) and Oliver Banks (121: Far Away). 
> 
> Things that never made it into the fic - Jon and Martin are making their way loosely down the west coast of the UK, so the city they stop in is Manchester. Martin's had those rings in his pocket since Glasgow. 
> 
> Feel free to say hi on Tumblr! :D


End file.
